Is there nothing under the sun that isn’t a reflection of 2018’s navel gazing gobbledygook? Is there anything at all that they’ll leave to simply be? It seems one could grow a tomato garden and somewhere there’s a ninny that’ll imagine it as a statement about oppression or female empowerment or whatever. (I don’t want what they’re selling. Unless you can slice off some fresh empowerment and add it to a cheeseburger I’m not interested.)
But hey, that’s just me right? I’m just an uninformed deplorable who can’t quite grok the nuance of Medieval history, a subject about which I’ve already noted I’m ill informed. Surely modern professionals in the field are unbiased chroniclers of the very old information in question?
Nope! Here’s a link to a long detailed article about SJWs going apeshit on one particular history prof. (Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.) She wouldn’t bow to their spectacularly irrelevant, new and improved 2018-based ways of thinking. As night follows day, they fired up a shit flinging drama fest in attempts to… Well I’m not sure about their end game. I’m not sure they are either. Maybe it just feels good to fling shit?
The article has a lot of detailed information. It sounds like an honest (and humorous) history professor was unfairly called racist, sexist, white supremacist, boo boo head, and other nasty things. Nevertheless she persisted. (Never fear to use their own vocabulary! You never know if a speck of cognitive dissonance will help some of the brighter space cadets see a different view.)
It would be nice to think that academics involving events from 1,200 years ago would be free of modern bullshit. Alas, we’re in a cycle where people act as if life is all within the state, nothing outside the state. (See what I did there?) If I can’t breathe air in America without somehow offending someone’s politics I suppose I can’t expect it in even the most obscure of academic endeavors.
It must be maddening. How can a professor productively discuss the Edict of Toleration by Galerius (date: 313) in a world where nitwits reinterpreted the word ‘tolerance’ last week and will reinterpret it again next Tuesday? Snowflakes lose their goddamn mind if you bring up attitudes of 1,700 years ago. They sure as hell aren’t up to learning something new. What can you do to instruct the mighty omniscience granted every youth with a student loan?
Short answer? Can’t be done. Shut up and play your assigned role at the vote farm.
Here are a few interesting tidbits:
“You might think Medieval Studies an odd place for a widespread social justice incursion. Perhaps the activists are just working their way down the list of university departments: they’ve conquered just about everywhere else, after all.”
…
“[t]he Middle Ages were invoked to imagine what Europe was really about, and who Europeans were. You can see why the progressive Left wants to tear it down.”
…
“Eileen Joy has complained that people use medieval history as a “haven” to study white Christianity, as though there were something intrinsically objectionable about that, and ignoring the fact that Christianity was the culture of a largely fair-skinned Europe. According to Joy, the field is a “safe space to be elitist, a safe space to be white, a safe space to be Christian, Eurocentric, misogynist.” But complaining about too much Christianity in Medieval Studies is analogous to objecting to too many numbers in math.”
That’s PRECISELY my point. I noticed lectures where folks got hot and bothered by the only two queens that got a lot of screen time in a two hundred year window. In other situations, otherwise unemployable folks are bitching about Christianity in a place that was called non-ironically Christendom? Bonkers! Whining about male centered analysis in a time where big dudes cleaving skulls with swords was a common way to negotiate differences? Insane! Wincing about words like “barbarian” or “heretic” or “empire” when those are the places that originated those very words? Self-defeating.
I don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes. We’ll know it when we get there. But if there are 2018 political ramifications to thousand year old medieval history… we’ve already dug pretty goddamn deep.
A.C.
P.S. None of this is to dissuade anyone from learning history. It feels good to learn anything you didn’t heretofore know. Knowledge isn’t wisdom but it’s a necessary building block. Also history gives me a mind for the long game. I start seeing patterns in centuries and eras instead of weeks and months. I’m often surprised at how many ideas that once looked newly hatched by slackers at Starbucks are revealed as a rehash of the same old thing. At least in terms of humans forming societies, there really is nothing new under the sun.